Pink of willowherb
and white of meadowsweet
line the road to Bezza Brook.
Where you cross at Bezza Bridge
step down, step down, step down
in the incantation of the strange-light
hear the brook’s flow see the spirits stream
on the walls of the tunnel of life.
Dwell not on the tunnel of death
lest you hear the Skriker skrike.
Do not look for a rag on the wind
or an eye in the midst of the strange-light.
Four wells at Preston New Road.
Four wells at Roseacre.
Four wells in the darkness
between drilling and decision.
Four wells of steel meets shale.
Four wells boring into the mind.
Four wells of screaming poison.
Four wells of deadly sands of time.
Four wells where gas the question
scorches ears of invisible skies.
Four wells? An uneasy whisper
from underworld gods.
Four wells to decide the future.
Four wells of choice. Four wells of trembling.
By the word on four wells our land
will be saved or destroyed.
~
This is a poem I sent to Lancashire County Council’s Development Management Group along with more logical reasons why I am opposed to Caudrilla’s drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of four wells at Preston New Road and Roseacre. Protests at the County Hall will be beginning tomorrow (Wed 23rd June) as LCC make their final decision about Caudrilla’s application. For more information on how to register opposition by e-mail and join the protest see Frack Free Lancashire’s website.
Below are some photos from when I visited the potential fracking site at Preston New Road. The area is cordoned off and anti-trespassing notices are in place. It looks like work has already been done to prepare it for the drilling rig.
It is summer in this-world when she is here
winter in this-world without her.
In Gwythyr’s arms she is Lady Life:
coming to be as the first snowdrop
purple yellow crocuses are her slippers
pink red primroses her cloak. Her smile
her lips are daffodils’ long trumpets.
May flowers weave her grassy hair
as she embraces this-world’s ruler.
In dewy glades Creiddylad is May Queen
in sacred marriage headdress a veil of hawthorn
wedding dress woven from wood anemone
wood sorrel she lies with him in woodlands
of bluebells starwort becoming buzzing fields
heliotropic gaze of ox-eye daisies poppies
face alive with vibrant butterflies and bees
exulting in the dance of pollen’s gold dust
until the seasons turn and cold winds come
she sees her time in this-world is over
and walks between worlds and lovers.
How jealous I am fragile flowers
of how you only arrive
once a year
how you are always beautiful
vibrant coloured
how you do not have to labour
on and on pink-fleshed at the modern wheel.
How ignorant you are of everything beneath you
of the effortfulness of soil
worms with their moon rakes
bent double like miners in midnight toil
the dung beetle rolling his ball
to the edge of the world.
Look down and see beauty costs the earth.
It is made of broken snail shells.
But you pretty flowers are not labourers.
Have you ever tried to sprout from a cold hard bulb?
Endured the underworld’s permafrost?
Seen miniscules of worms die?
Do you know the origin of minerals or miracles?
We are told they come from God.
They come from years and the bones of dinosaurs.
Do you know how many continents
it takes to make a flower?
How many extinctions?
How the rumbling of plague carts
served us before you were here?
How like you we come from many deaths?
I did not know you could talk or how
we have grown together.
I am amazed.
My widening eyes
are brimming with forbidden knowledge.
Then be beautiful in your petals for us
tread lightly on the dead
for these are short hours
of spring sun
before we cast our bodies
on the ground and are together again.
I.
Where factories
are washed into the earth,
the old mill in the thrutch
over-run by rolling rapids,
white waters stir
in a wind-swept cauldron.
A voice between drops of water,
lichen and rocks
offers a glimpse
of another piece of world;
a handful of light,
sarcophagus and broken chair,
scattered flowers
offerings of souls
worshipful in a shared space,
remains of fairies and giants.
II.
When I think I have left
the voice calls me back
to speak my testimony
in that memory-place
cleft between dripping water,
rocks and lichen:
the fairies chapel
I will make my home.
My arrival is slow to wonder
initial disbelief
fading into silver-lined water
the mirror imprint
of Nith’s name a god in glass
becoming grey cloud
in the ether says
BELIEVE BELIEVE.
In the netherworld gloaming birds
shriek BELIEVE BELIEVE:
barnacle geese beat
black and white hearts against Crifell.
As the dark moon starts her slow pull
downward to Invernith
my fingers brush water
and touch a silver hand.
He wears twigs for antlers,
a long wolfish face
and smile or grimace
trapped somewhere between.
His coat is staring and grey
as something dead for years.
A bottomless cloak
covers what he’d call his feet.
When he moves, he sways
like something blown in on the wind.
He staggers,
tilting like a chess piece,
holds out a black pad with yellow claws,
unable to unlock heavy jaws,
mumbles, “beri, beri, beri.”
His words are grey as the melting moor
fading with the sense
of his request or question.
Does he want berries,
or does he want me to bury him?
He shivers with the hills,
passes away into a crack of light.
~
I wrote this poem in July after a vivd dream where I saw the sketchy image below, there labelled ‘an old grey man of lancashire,’ in vivid purple on a black computer screen. After waking, I scribbled it in my dream journal.
In the space between waking and dream before my alarm clock went off the scene in the poem came to me. Fans of Ted Hughes may recognise that I was immersed in ‘The Remains of Elmet’ at the time and this colours the imagery.
A couple of days later, planning a walk, I had an impulse to visit Brinscall. Getting the map out, I noticed nearby was Old Man’s Hill, which became the destination on a suitably grey Lancashire day. I encountered a ram beside a strangely rooted hawthorn but nothing extraordinary happened and I received no clear answer to my pondery.
Spurned birds circle
fields weeping
for all that is good
in the world
gone
dry harvest
all the legions of the dead
strewn fallen scattered
let them seed
this world in the arms of their loved ones
the circles begin again
hearts cut in twain
by the reapers’ blades
hear them come
softly sweeping bare-footed
with the silence of a love song
pile straw onto carts
the hallowed dead
ascending in a cloud of wings
spirits of Annwn fly over reaped fields
then down and under
circling circling
Old sun sinks
into the bowels of the city
which holds me in its windows,
in panes of light golden as mead.
Dusk arrives in a purple cloak,
dresser of towers and spires,
not softening the concrete brutal curves
of this maligned iconic genius
whose rawness of might is like a clenched fist,
whose vulnerable underbelly knows the hope
of arrivals and vast pain of final departures,
busking, shrieks and the reek of piss.
Yellow and pink the city lights up,
etching its electronic dream on a moving backdrop;
the palimpsest of museums, mills and stadiums
that have fired our consciousness
and kept us small and discrete,
a match box car and two tiny figures
lost within a car park’s cosmic changes,
sole witnesses to its theophanies
until the arrival of the suicide watch.
Unsung meadow
with your summer snowfall,
wild carrot, buttercup and nettle,
time is slowing down.
Unsung meadow
with your summer snowfall,
plantain, clover and yellow rattle,
world is slowing down.
In my summer eiderdown
time and world are slowing down,
sleep easy, sleep easy, sleep easy,
unsung meadow sings.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 